Even before the ink was dry on an article Nathaniel wrote last year about an online lending start-up, Social Finance, and its unusual success — headlined “SoFi, an Online Lender, Is Looking for a Relationship” — he began hearing from people who painted a very different picture of what life looked like inside the company.

Katie was among those who reached out to Nathaniel: She told him about conversations she had, a few years back, with some veterans of the company. While turnover is typical in the early days of a Silicon Valley start-up, people had hinted at misbehavior among the executive ranks. The chief executive, Mike Cagney, seemed particularly controversial.

We had no inkling that this history would be bad enough to force Mr. Cagney to give up his position as the C.E.O., as it did on Monday of this week, and to consume our lives for weeks. At the time, we simply put SoFi reporting on our to-do lists and then, like all reporters, got sidetracked by breaking news.

But in the intervening months, tales of sexual harassment and wrongdoing in Silicon Valley took center stage, in part because of Katie’s own reporting, which exposed a dark side to an industry known for growth, wealth and fantastic employee perks. Companies like Zenefits, Theranos and Uber made it clear that many venture capitalists and the companies they funded were incentivized to focus on growth at any cost, with good governance and corporate culture getting short shrift. Unsurprisingly, that created fertile ground for gender and racial discrimination, sexual harassment and regulatory issues.

In August, we got our opportunity to return to SoFi when a lawyer sent us the complaint for a lawsuit against the company, charging that an employee had been fired for reporting sexual harassment allegations to management.

The litigation seemed minor in some ways: It was brought by an employee who had worked at the company for less than a year, in a satellite office removed from corporate headquarters. (That satellite office in Healdsburg, Calif., a small town in wine country, was in keeping with the chief executive’s reputation as an oenophile.) But the complaints in the lawsuit seemed consistent with things we had previously heard, so we wrote a short article about it.

Former employees quickly began to reach out, saying the problems were not isolated to Healdsburg, or to sexual harassment. These employees were uncomfortable with Mr. Cagney’s willingness to pursue female employees, but also with his desire to grow the lending business by taking big risks. Both of us covered the financial crisis in New York, and we knew that risky lending can cause a lot of pain — for borrowers, for the lenders themselves and for society more broadly — when borrowers discover that they can’t pay back their loans.

A story like this necessitates a ton of phone calls, and it’s typical to get a whole range of responses. So we were surprised by the consistency of the anecdotes shared by everyone from executives to customer service representatives, from all periods of SoFi’s history. In total, we reached more than 30 SoFi veterans, along with many investors who knew the company well.

We had to talk to so many people, in part, because almost everyone we spoke to was willing to speak with us only on background, not for attribution, so as not to jeopardize their current jobs. When using unnamed sources, you can print only information that can be verified by multiple people, given that readers can’t evaluate the reliability of the sources themselves.

And it’s important to note that many of the people who reached out to us believed in the importance of SoFi’s basic effort to challenge the financial industry and provide better choices for consumers who need to borrow money. They said they were speaking to us, in many cases, because they wanted to save the company from executives who were putting that at risk.

Exploring all of this as a team helped us at several points. We could both draw on different sets of sources and cover ground more quickly. We also served as checks on what leads to follow and which ones to ignore.

But none of this made the reporting easy, especially coming as it did during August. Nathaniel was on vacation, and then Katie on her honeymoon. Many calls were made from pools and beachside balconies. In an unexpectedly lucky twist, visa delays put the kibosh on an overseas reporting trip Nathaniel had scheduled for the first week in September.

When we went to the company on Saturday, to begin our fact-checking process, we assumed we had a long haul ahead of us to finish our story: The company needed to hear every detail we would run and have an opportunity to respond. But on Monday afternoon it became clear that the company’s board was meeting — and was looking at the allegations we were bringing to them.

When we learned that Mr. Cagney was about to announce his departure, we were not ready to pull the trigger on our full article about his history, so we put together a short piece that explained some of the basic allegations, which went in Tuesday’s paper. Then we got straight to work, pulling an all-nighter to get the full article, which ran Wednesday, ready to go.

We are already getting more emails and phone calls that point to where the story might go from here — both with SoFi and the issue of bad behavior in Silicon Valley more broadly. These issues aren’t going away anytime soon.